Musings of Two Creative Minds

Review by Helen Krummenacker This book was copyrighted in 1962, which explains why it reads like a very old-fashioned, Cold War Era story on one hand, with the language of the era, and yet has elements that would be futuristic by today’s standards. It also predates the period where writers decided longer is better-- it’s decidedly light on padding and has a crispness to the language. Overall, it reads like a Young Adult novel, not demanding much of the reader but imagination and a bit of tolerance for mild sexism and ablism. The writers, Randall Garrett and Lawrence Janifer, give us an FBI agent assigned a seemingly impossible case: there is a spy working, presumably for the Russians, to ferret out what is happening with a project for a new kind of space drive. The reason that catching the spy may be impossible is that the spy is a telepath. By coincidence, a second research project at the same facility had been studying telepathy and developed the means to determine when someon...

With the coming of Halloween, I've been in a mood for scary books.  So today I decided to pull out one of my favorites and do a review on it.  This was the first novel I read by Mr. Straub, but it got me hooked.  I've read a number of his other works and he has yet to keep me entertained and enthralled.... "What's the worst thing you ever done?" "I won't tell you, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me..." These are the words that set the "The Chowder Society", four elderly men who've known each other since they were young, into telling each other ghost stories. They've all known each other since their youth, when they were wild and reckless. Friendship and loyalty binds, them along with dark secret from those past days.   They tried to bury that secret and forget it, but some things don't want to be forgotten. Sometimes, they also want... revenge! "Ghost Story" is NO...

Okay, in my last entry I disclosed I was working on a vampire novel.  Now this is a genre that has been done and redone so many times it's unbelievable.  And almost every time there are new twists and turns added to it that they barely seem to resemble the traditional vampires that Bela Legosi and Christopher Lee made legendary in Hollywood.  Today we have vampires that just totally ooze sex appeal, can sparkle in daylight instead of turning to dust, can have sex and produce offspring, are either monsters or saints, etc.  And they are still as popular as ever in spite of all the changes to the original legend. Now I'm not just talking about Bram Stoker's "Dracula".  That was not the first vampire story.  There were many others. If you ever get the opportunity check out "The Penguin Book Of Vampire Stories" and you'll see ones that predate Mr. Stoker's work by quite a few years.  But in that collection you'll also meet other kinds of vampire...

     Today I want to discuss a setting and also a plot device I'm using.  Above you see the remains of a concrete ship.  Yes, you read correctly a ship partly made from concrete.  This vessel is the S. S. Palo Alto, built to serve in WWI when steel and metal supplies were becoming scarce.  She was part of a fleet of 12 experimental vessels.  Unfortunately, she was completed in 1919 after the war was over and made her only self-powered voyage to the San Francisco Bay Area.  There she sat for 10 years and was eventually purchased by an entertainment company and towed to Seacliff near Santa Cruz.  Once she came here, she was refitted and turned into an entertainment showcase.  An arcade, fine dining, a bar, even a pool was built inside of her to the pleasures of her many visitors.  The middle photo above is a model replica of her in those glory days when she was known as "The Amusement Ship".  Unfortunately, two ye...